The folks in Microsoft Research have been trying out ideas in functional programming for quite a while. Not too long ago, Microsoft moved to begin to include aspects of F# in Visual Studio.

If you want a good starting point for a any F# research you may have considred, take a look at SearchWinDevelopment.com. The site has pulled together a valuable set of F# resources.

Functional programming emerged to some extent with the original version of Lisp. Its potential benefits include mathematical programming style and a strong type system. Microsoft’s interest in F# portends a general movement which could see ever more languages being supported by the CLR.